Do heat pumps need a new name?
I like "Kelvinator," but it's already taken.
“Heat pumps that look like George Clooney”
Mike Munsell of Canary Media discusses whether heat pumps need a new name. The problem is the implication that the devices only provide heat, or that the name is too dry and technical. Suggestions from Twitter included “Temperature comfort machine” or “Home comfort system.” My favourites were “Freedom machine” and “Heaty McPumpface.”
John Semmelhack is, as usual, sensible. But there is an issue about semantics here that goes back decades, perhaps a century.
The first problem we have is that the heat pumps invented by Willis Carrier got branded as “air conditioners” when the same could be said about your furnace; it is changing the air temperature, not “conditioning” air, whatever that means. The industry didn’t help when it adopted the term HVAC or Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning, as if they were three different things.
It’s not the heat pump that needs a new name; it’s the air conditioner that is problematic because air conditioners are heat pumps that work like your refrigerator. When a refrigerant changes from liquid to gas, it absorbs heat from your home or your food, and when it is compressed back into a liquid, it releases heat, which has to go somewhere; with your fridge, into your kitchen; with a cooling heat pump AKA air conditioner, outside. When it is time to warm your home, it runs in reverse, pumping heat from outdoors to indoors.
This is why I wanted to run out of the room and scream when Mr. MacArthur Genius Electrify Everything Saul Griffith tweeted this, without noting that these were two billion cooling heat pumps (CHP?) needed for a heating world.
There are several reasons that the term “heat pump” puts people off. Many wonder how it can pump heat from the outside in winter when there is so little heat to pump. But there is heat in the air right down to 0 degrees Kelvin or Absolute Zero; there is only a small percentage difference between a balmy 293°K (20°C) and this weekend’s very cold 253°K (-20°C). There is still lots of heat to pump. That’s why I like the idea of calling them Kelvinators, after Lord Kelvin, who figured this all out. Unfortunately, the name is already taken.
But there is also an industry aversion to using the term “heat pump.” Fifteen years ago, Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHP) were going to save the world. The industry branded them as “geothermal heating and cooling systems.” When I wrote this jargon watch post, I got comments like “This strikes me as uninformed drive-by "journalism" if you can call it that. Geo - Earth; Thermal - Heat.” Companies claimed that it was “tapping into a renewable resource- the earth’s heat.” They could never quite explain how it cooled too. Experts like Alex Wilson and John Straube also complained that “geothermal” should be reserved for systems that used heat directly from natural sources, with Straube noting, “The use of alternate terms provides little useful information and tends to be the product of marketing groups who have little interest in the underlying mechanics of GSHP.”
They are still doing this; if you look at the current website for Dandelion Energy, the GSHP company spun out of Google/Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” they no longer call it renewable energy as they used to, but they use the words “heat pump” about twice on the entire site and keep peddling the idea that it is geothermal. It’s not; it’s a bloody heat pump, and just call it that. Geothermal isn’t better marketing; it’s just wrong.
“Air conditioner” and “geothermal” were both sexing up the term “heat pump” for marketing purposes, and look where it got us. Let’s not make the same mistake again. I was lying in bed last night thinking of sexier names for air source heat pumps (Thermodaire? Unfrigerator?) and concluded: let’s stop using the term “air conditioner” and, as Nate noted, call these wonderful devices that move heat from one place to another what they are: heat pumps.
Also read Mike Munsell’s hilarious post Check out these heat pumps that look like George Clooney. Now that would be a sexy name for heat pumps– Clooneydaire?